


the language of another world

by redpaint



Category: Formula 1 RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - 1920s, M/M, Science, Scotland, a hodgepodge of every movie that involves romance among rural isolation, literally no clue what to tag this i'm sorry.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:29:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27539152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redpaint/pseuds/redpaint
Summary: Charles is sent down from Oxford (drunkenness, absenteeism, behavior unbecoming of a Balliol man) and becomes the research assistant to a botanist who is doing fieldwork in the Shetland Islands.
Relationships: Charles Leclerc/Sebastian Vettel
Comments: 19
Kudos: 75





	the language of another world

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Directionless_Foray](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Directionless_Foray/gifts).



> I have literally no excuse or explanation for this concept except some vague influences from half-reading Brideshead Revisited and loving the aesthetic of wind-blown rainy islands. All knowledge of botany is made up by me. Vaguely set in the early 20th century. Barely edited, all mistakes are my own.
> 
> For Directionless_Foray, with so, so much love.

Charles is sent down from Oxford in his second year (drunkenness, absenteeism, behavior unbecoming of a Balliol man) much to his mother’s chagrin. She meets him at the station with kisses on both cheeks like she always does, but her smile seems a little forced, the pleasantries exchanged in the taxi home more nervous than curious. She pats his knee, _don’t worry, many brilliant men have taken breaks from their schooling, genius is often misunderstood._

Genius isn’t what got Charles kicked out of university. Still, he doesn’t complain. He just rests his head against the cool glass of the window and nods at the appropriate times, making sure to look properly contrite.

Home seems smaller every time he returns. There’s a car parked in the circular gravel drive when they arrive. Charles glances at his mother, but she doesn’t note it. Strange. He leaves the driver to struggle with his bags and treads over the front steps, dimpled with a century of use, and into the foyer. He has half a mind to claim a headache and spend the rest of the afternoon alone with his snuffbox, but he’s stopped by the emergence of a figure from the other end of the hall.

“Who are you?” He accuses, twisting around to call for his mother. But she’s at his shoulder in an instant, beaming and beckoning this stranger in for a hug.

“Don’t be rude! Herr Vettel is only among the most respected scholars in his field, and not to mention he’s an old friend of your aunt’s.” She kisses this stranger on both cheeks too.

He has bright, playful eyes. His handshake is warm and callused.

“And what field would that be?” Charles asks. He smells a plot.

“Botany, though your mother might be a bit too generous to my reputation.” Herr Vettel replies, smiling. Charles can’t stand the worn-out elbows of his corduroy jacket or the lick of hair that refuses to lie flat on the top of his head.

“And he’s in need of an assistant,” Charles’s mother says, still smiling, as though this was all some kind of happy coincidence.

Charles has never succeeded in keeping a plant alive for more than a few months. His dormitory was littered with dying orchids and jars of wilted wildflowers.

“I’m doing some field research in the Shetland Islands. Your mother tells me that you have come into a good deal more free time.” There is dirt clinging to the soles of his boots, which look about a decade old. _The Shetland Islands._ Christ. Charles is being punished, isn’t he?

⁂

They find lodging in an old stone building by the beach. It’s a little larger than a cottage, but not much. Wind and rain lash the windows their first night, and there’s only a few dry twigs for firewood and so they go cold and silent until they fall asleep on the first soft surfaces they find, their bags still unpacked. Charles sleeps off the travel deep into the morning. When he wakes up, his room smells like brown sugar.

There’s a pot of porridge on the stove in the kitchen, still warm, syrupy with molasses. Herr Vettel ( _call me Sebastian_ ) is fiddling with a case of assorted tools and vials on the small, hand-hewn table. He’s more businesslike now than he was on their long, quiet boat trip North. He had mostly sat by himself, smiling down at the pages of one of his books, occasionally poking fun at Charles’s weak stomach and unseasoned sea legs. Now he double-checks that his sample kit is intact, frowning at the leather straps that hold the vials in the case.

“You’d better eat quick. The tide will only be low enough to collect the right samples for the next hour,” Sebastian says, without looking up. There’s an open notebook on the table next to him, and he nudges it in Charles’s direction when he sits down. “There’s a very specific mutation that we’re looking for. Eat, memorize that, and let’s go. Did you bring rubber boots?”

Charles did not, in fact, bring rubber boots. He borrows Sebastian’s spare pair, which pinch his toes and make the process of standing ankle-deep in the murky gray sea, bent over, looking for seaweed with spiral, _not opposite,_ phyllotaxy, even more unpleasant than it would be otherwise. The spray stings his eyes and makes his lips taste like salt.

Sebastian paces the sand a few feet away, his nose so close to the water it’s almost comical. Charles wants to admire someone willing to look so silly in the pursuit of the thing he loves, but he doesn’t think he can. He looks back at his own patch of sea.

“So, sent down?” Sebastian asks, after a long period of silence. Charles grits his teeth.

“Yes.”

“Poor grades?”

“I had always heard that Germans were straightforward people, not rude.”

Seb laughs. Not the response Charles expected. “I think I have a right to know about my assistant’s qualifications.”

Charles stands up straight and stretches his back. The rising tide is making it more difficult to spot the floating plants under the water. “My qualifications are that my family is funding your research to stop me from wasting away in boredom at the ancestral home. That seemed good enough for you when you took me on.”

“Alright, if you don’t want to talk we don’t have to talk. Just figured with no one for miles around and two weeks to go it might be worth getting to know each other,” Seb says, shrugging. It really sounds like he doesn’t mind one way or another. It grates on Charles’s nerves.

Charles doubles back over, squinting his eyes to try and see through the briny foam. He sees nothing but a reflection of the wide, gloomy sky.

⁂

It rains again the following evening, a proper storm complete with booming claps of thunder that seem to rattle the ancient foundations of their cottage. Sebastian builds a respectable fire in the main hearth and pulls up a chair to read by it as the night grows colder, darker, and more tempestuous. Charles makes himself a cup of tea and brings it back to his room, where he can spike it with one of the strong spirits he brought in his luggage. The warmth from the fire doesn’t leach into the rest of the house, the walls too thick and sturdy for their own good. Charles spends a fitful hour trying to warm his toes under the scratchy wool blanket of his cot before he admits defeat and returns to the main room.

“Cold?” Sebastian asks, eyeing the blanket Charles has wrapped around his shoulders.

“I swear, it’s like it’s never dry out here,” Charles responds. He would like nothing more than to get good and drunk, warm and sleepy with it, but he knows it’s another early morning of sample collection tomorrow. No drunkenness, no sex, and no sleeping in. He’s practically been sent away to the priesthood.

“I think there’s a kind of beauty to it. It reminds me of old sailor’s tales, the wildness of the sea.”

A brilliant flash lights up the room, with thunder quick on its heels, a crescendo rounded out by the sound of a crashing wave on the beach, not a few hundred meters away. Sebastian looks down at his book, smiling to himself. “ _The water, like a witch's oils, Burnt green, and blue, and white._ Coleridge. Do they make you read this kind of stuff still?”

“I never paid much attention to it. Except for bits of Byron, the insults and the affairs and the doggerel.”

“Do you fancy yourself a Don Juan?”

“Don’t all the bored young men of Oxford?”

Sebastian marks his place in the book with his thumb and leans back more in his chair. The firelight catches his hair and turns it even more golden than before. “Is that what got you sent down?”

Charles pulls the blanket a little tighter around himself. “What got me sent down isn’t fit for polite verse.”

“What about impolite verse?”

“You tell me. Does Don Juan have one too many dalliances with his fellow bright young men in full view of the university quad to be dismissed as a bored rich boy’s games? Does he stupidly insult the father of one of the boys for being the stupid, pompous asshole that he is? Is he hauled before the deans, the night before sitting exams, not given the chance to pack up his room, and shipped off to earth’s asshole to shiver to death?” Charles realizes he should stop as he says it, but the sips of gin have gone to his head and he’s more angry about it than he’s ever been. His hair is damp and it feels like it’s been damp since they stepped off the boat. He can’t meet Sebastian’s eyes so he stares at the heart of the fire instead.

“You were very good with the samples,” Sebastian says, after a pause. It’s uncomfortable praise for both of them.

“Thank you,” Charles bites out, and downs the rest of his tea.

⁂

A week in and the rain fails to part in the morning. It’s a dark, depressing day, but Sebastian is still up and active, setting up his portable microscope with enough gusto that it wakes Charles up as well. “It’s good to slow down and see if we’re on the right path,” Sebastian says, his eyes glued to the lens. He’s wearing a home-knit sweater one size too big, and his curls have reached new heights of unruliness.

“Sure, we wouldn’t want to go exerting ourselves for nothing,” Charles mutters, trying and failing to rub out the soreness in his neck. The irony is lost on Sebastian, who just hums quietly to himself.

Charles chews on a stale biscuit and watches him work. It’s not the most entertaining thing in the world, but it’s better than the endless gray sea outside the window. Sebastian works with a steady precision that seems almost musical: peering into the lens, adjusting the focus, scribbling in his notebook, shuffling through a box of slides.

“Here, would you — the sample, the one I brought up with us, would you prepare a slide for me, of the petiole?” Sebastian gestures vaguely in the direction of his field kit.

Charles, for all the dons said about his failures as a university student, has become a quick expert in the basic vocabulary of marine botany. He takes the delicate scalpel from the bench and slices off a bit of verdant green leaf, mounting it under a hair-thin bit of glass. He places the slide in Sebastian’s outstretched palm, then turns to return to his biscuit.

“Wait,” Sebastian says. He quickly exchanges the slides in the microscope and pulls Charles in by his wrist. “Don’t you want to see what we’ve been working on?”

“I’m not sure I’d really know what I was looking at,” Charles says. Sebastian’s hands are so _warm._ Warm and dry.

“Humor me.” Sebastian turns the microscope so it’s pointing at Charles, an invitation to see the world on an entirely new level. Years of elite schooling provided plenty of hours of instruction in Greek and Latin, none in anything like this. He leans in, and it feels like leaning into a particularly daring kiss.

He almost doesn’t believe his eyes, that he could see something so small, so orderly, so perfect, here in this damp little cottage on the coast. He can’t stop himself gasping. The cells look like little building-blocks, pebbled like the walls of a Norman castle. Charles doesn’t want to look up, both from the beauty of the view and the knowledge that Sebastian will be looking at him, so _proud_ to have gotten a reaction out of him and doing such a poor job of hiding it. But his neck aches and so eventually he pulls away from the lens.

“It’s beautiful,” he says. There’s no reason to pretend it’s not.

“I’m glad you agree,” Sebastian says, and leans in to take a look himself. The movement is so graceful, Charles is glad Sebastian can’t see him blush.

⁂

“Will you read some of it to me?” Charles asks one night, when it’s been two hours since either of them have spoken and Sebastian has done nothing but thumb through his book again. _An Anthology of Romantic Poetry,_ in English rather than German. It seems a strange choice for a man of science, but to Charles it’s become more of a rival than a book. It takes Sebastian away for hours at a time, and while he can be annoying and prying and tragically _old,_ he’s still Charles’s only chance of keeping his sanity intact.

Sebastian raises his eyebrows at the question. Then he holds out the open book. “Why don’t you give it a try? You’ve got more of the character for Manfred anyway.”

“You’re in the middle of a play.”

“Oh, not very much has happened. Manfred is tortured by some kind of guilt involving his dead lover, but he goes and seeks forgetfulness rather than forgiveness. It’s another of his long speeches. Go on, with feeling, now.”

Charles stares down at the page. It reminds him of reciting verse as a schoolboy, but the words seem to come with more difficulty than Greek or Latin ever did.

“I linger yet with Nature, for the night  
Hath been to me a more familiar face  
Than that of man; and in her starry shade  
Of dim and solitary loveliness,  
I learn’d the language of another world.”

Charles pauses, looks up. Seb is gazing at him softly, his cheek pillowed on one hand. “Go on,” he says, quietly, as though not to break the spell.

“I do remember me, that in my youth,  
When I was wandering,—upon such a night  
I stood within the Coliseum’s wall —”

He isn’t sure where it comes from, but the words suddenly strike him as unbearably sad, the kind of crushing, bone-deep sadness that offers you nothing to do but cry. Charles closes the book as quickly as he can, but it’s too late. He blinks back the tears as best he can and offers it back to Sebastian spine-first. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s gotten into me. Maybe another night.”

Sebastian takes the book and places it on the hearth. “Another night,” he echoes.

Charles retires to his cold, scratchy bed and thinks about Sebastian sitting in his chair by the fire, following the swooping highs and lows of the verses in his book with the same placid look on his face.

⁂

When the weather clears, they venture out to a further beach. There are only a few days left before they are due to sail south again, and Sebastian is eager to gather as many samples from as wide an area as he can for his survey. They hike out before first light, swaddled in layers of wool and waxed cotton to keep the morning mist from chilling them to their bones.

The sun comes up over the sea as they’re collecting their first cuttings. It’s weak and more blue-gray than yellow, but the brilliance, after so many days of rain, is a blessing. Charles leans down close to the water and stuffs one unruly leaf into a vial. His hands ache from the cold water. Next to him, Sebastian stands in the surf, facing the sunrise with his eyes closed.

That same feeling comes on again — the kind of sadness that comes from an overwhelming abundance of beauty, of absolute peace, so brutally fleeting. It nearly makes Charles drop the vial, but he pockets it with shaking hands. He steps close to Sebastian. Water laps at their ankles. He wonders if Sebastian’s lips taste like salt. And, in one moment of bravery, he reaches out and weaves their fingers together, warmth between coldness between warmth.

**Author's Note:**

> redpaint on tumblr


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